Best Way To Archive Emails For Later Searching?

An anonymous reader writes "I have kept every email I have ever sent or received since 1990, with the exception of junk mail (though I kept a lot of that as well). I have migrated my emails faithfully from Unix mail, to Eudora, to Outlook, to Thunderbird and Entourage, though I have left much of the older stuff in Outlook PST files. To make my life easier I would now like to merge all the emails back into a single searchable archive — just because I can. But there are a few problems: a) Moving them between email systems is SLOW; while the data is only a few GB, it is hundred of thousands of emails and all of the email systems I have tried take forever to process the data. b) Some email systems (i.e. Outlook) become very sluggish when their database goes over a certain size. c) I don't want to leave them in a proprietary database, as within a few years the format becomes unsupported by the current generation of the software. d) I would like to be able to search the full text, keep the attachments, view HTML emails correctly and follow email chains. e) Because I use multiple operating systems, I would prefer platform independence. f) Since I hope to maintain and add emails for the foreseeable future, I would like to use some form of open standard. So, what would you recommend?"

Comments

DO NOT DELETE.

[GuyFawkes]

I can't tell you the number of times I nearly deleted my archived data, going back to 1997 in my case, not just e-mail either.

Then I got falsely accused of everything except 9-11 as part of a separation / child custody battle that started with a nuclear attack out of the blue.

It is amazing how much of that old data is relevant in such cases, "He did x on 1st June 2000 at our house!" and you have data showing you were 200 miles away doing something you had completely forgotten, with someone you haven't spoken to or seen for 7 years, at the time...

DO NOT DELETE YOUR ARCHIVES, EVER!***

*** unless of course you are a bad person and they incriminate you, in which case you'd better avoid everyone else who archives data.

Re:RETARD MODERATION

[halltk1983]

Virtualbox is platform independent, and he also mentioned using a VM. Once all the email is on the IMAP server in the VM, you could easily attach to it with a client that runs on any platform.

Also, IMAP servers are platform independent, as they can run on OSX, Windows, Linux, BSD, and almost any other popular OS I can think of. It's just that Linux distros are common, easy to set up, and light enough on resources that they would be easy to set up in a VM, and without the licensing costs of OSX or Windows, it becomes price comparable to lesser solutions.

I know it's a lot to ask these days to get people to read the comments that they are replying to, but maybe, just maybe, someone complaining about a lack of reading comprehension should take more time to read.